Evolution: frog adaptation (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, September 17, 2017, 10:34 (491 days ago)@ David Turell

DAVID: You and I will always differ on where the spark comes from. The increase in oxygen provided the energy for the complex animals of the Cambrian to appear. It did not require their appearance.

dhw: As we have agreed a thousand times, no appearance was “required” beyond that of bacteria. That is why I go beyond survival to improvement. New conditions present new opportunities, and these were provided by the increase in oxygen.

DAVID: But as the frogs show, new opportunities does not mean they are always taken.

If my hypothesis is correct, evolution depends on the intelligence of the cell communities that all individual organisms consist of. Some will exploit opportunities to innovate, and some will remain as they are, and some will die out.

Dhw: If your God’s prime purpose was to produce Homo sapiens and his brain, do you really think he was incapable of doing it without millions of years of “preparatory” work?

DAVID: Since we do not see direct creation but evolution, that must be God's preference. His ability to directly create is seen in saltations of irreducibly complex mechanisms.

Since we see the evolution of apes to hominins to humans to sapiens instead of direct creation of sapiens, and we see the evolution of pre-whales to whales, and we see the evolution of countless other species, lifestyles and natural wonders with no conceivable connection to the brain of Homo sapiens, perhaps it was your God’s preference to let evolution run its own course.